Instead of being dinosaurs for the umpteenth time, this year the boys were struck by an 11th hour inspiration: Willy Wonka and Charlie, from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one of our themes this fall. It was Gareth’s idea to be Wonka; he’s quite the imaginative 6-year-old, and has the drama experience and personality to pull the roll off. Don’t you think?

Here’s how the magic unfolded, after a trip to Don’s Hobby Shop (hat, carnation, bowtie, cane) and a lucky trip to Goodwill (gold pin-striped black velour jacket—what a find!). Jim helped Gareth get into his outfit for a Halloween party we attended:

And here he is seeing himself in the mirror for the first time:

And with “Charlie”, who looks concerned about where Wonka is pointing that cane!

At the Halloween party with his friend “Jack Sparrow”. Wonka and Sparrow have been friends since birth. Even with the blur, I love this picture of their friendship:

The following day we carved our jack-o-lantern. Well, the boys and Jim did. Pumpkin is one of the few smells I absolutely cannot stand—gagville!—and pumpkin guts?  Aaaaaaggghhhh! The texture!

Gareth was just fine getting right into the guts, while Daegan separated out the seeds for roasting. He ate most of them too, once they were ready.

Jim was teaching the boys about how to cut safely as he worked.

And the finished product (sorry the pic is blurry):

Halloween night. It took a moment, but lots of adults broke into a big smile when they sorted out who the boys were dressed up as. I love that they came up with something unusual, and very tied to their interests right now:

The kids then played a relay game to build the biggest pile of leaves. They broke into two teams, where one kid per team ran to the other end of the field to gather leaves, then ran to put them in a pile, and sprinted back to their team to tag the next runner to go. It is such a lovely environment for the kids surrounded by nature, and I like how the emphasis at running club is on fun and cheering on your team:

They soon told everyone to go and gather leaves all at once, in a big pile. Charge!

Once a fair-sized pile was built up, they called all the kids in for the big finale. Everyone pick up a big armful of leaves from the pile…

And…..wheeeeeeeeee!!!!

Needless to say, the kids loved this. So one more time everyone…..wheeeeeee!

The boys love this program. The people running it are friendly and helpful, and have the kids doing proper warm-up, longer runs, games, sprints, and so on. They make good use of the resources in the park, with its different pathways, playgrounds (the kids preferred cool down activity!), and nature. No running that same route over and over again here! No running endless “laps around the track”  (snore!) we all did in highschool. There’s a nice mix of ages and genders among kids and parent volunteers too. And the cost simply can’t be beat: $15 per kid for 6 weeks of running. Awesome!

I am so appreciative of these sorts of community resources that make raising kids and homeschooling that much easier. So what sorts of things do you take advantage of that are on offer in your community?

Most of them [the local people] only speak Spanish, but I can communicate by making signs with my penis.

In another story, How to Enjoy Yourself on the Beach, I ended up reading about using toboggans to play volleyball, and enjoying a lunch of hard-boiled cows. And (one for adult eyes only), in the Vacations story, we ended up with the sentence “I like to spend my time reading or screwing.” Jim and I both nearly laughed up a lung on that one.

Anyways, back to the ‘educational benefits’. This Mad Libs app suits both my boys very well right now. For Daegan, who is currently learning parts of speech in his grammar lessons, the connection is obvious. And as part of his paragraph writing lessons this year he is also working on using more descriptive language (“petrified” instead of “scared”, “enormous” instead of “big”, etc.), it is also giving him a chance to flex this ‘skill muscle’ as well. For Gareth, the grammar component is largely over his head, but the stories are giving him reading practice, and the way the app has set up the prompts is brilliant. For the vast majority of general “noun”, “verb”, “adjective”-type prompts, there is a ‘hint’ button in the top right corner that you can tap and a selection of nouns, verbs, or adjectives go floating by on banners, allowing you to choose one:

This is excellent reading practice for Gareth, and he is surprising us by some of the words he is reading—like “stadium”. Typing in the words could give a child spelling practice, and unlike the pencil and paper Mad Libs, these apps make it easy to ‘erase’ your answers and play again and again. We enjoyed the free app so much we bought one of the two paid apps currently available. At $3.99 they are expensive for an app, but that price is still cheaper than any paper version of Mad Libs we saw in the store.

I’ve written before about some of the things we used early on in helping Gareth learn to read, like the We Read Phonics series, the Mouse Makes Words book, and Evan-Moor’s Word Family series workbooks. Though Gareth enjoyed these things, he was still needing a lot of help and firmly at the “struggling emergent reader” stage, rather than the “confident fluent reader” he is now. Somewhere in the following series of materials, things “clicked” and Gareth became a reader:

All About Spelling “more words and phrases” section at the end of each lesson, has taken Gareth from slowly reading (sounding out) simple CVC words, like these, in April:

to this by late June, when we finished Level 1:

to fluently reading this, today:

All other materials we borrowed from the library. We used two ‘Sound of the Letter A / B / C etc’ phonics reader series, both from Child’s World. The Wonder Books Phonics Readers with titles like:

and the Phonics Friends series, with titles like:

We read much of a second series Treasure Bay, the folks who do the We Read Phonics books which Gareth loved. This series is called We Both Read, and has you and your child reading the story together, your parent page with more complex text, and the child’s page simpler. These books have a very good progression from pre-reading (child’s page has only one word, and it completes a rhyme from the parent’s page), to quite complex. We stopped at Level 1-2, with Gareth reading about one paragraph of material on his page. I thought the titles that were retellings of classic stories / fairy tales were particularly good, and the series has a good balance of fiction and non-fiction, boy-friendly and girl-friendly titles:

The I Can Read! series, specifically the “My First I Can Read!" titles, like the adventures of Biscuit the pup, Mittens the cat, and more:

Now, we are out of series books and on to a HUGE fantastic levelled reading list (which you can find here) which I learned about at the Well-Trained Mind K-8 Curriculum board. (If you haven’t checked the boards / forums out yet, I’d encourage you to do so, as discussion is not all about the Well-Trained Mind or even conventional curriculum. And folks there range from conservative Christian school-at-home to athiest / agnostic unschoolers, and everything in between.) Though my local library only has about 1/4 of the titles (I’m finding it has more of them as we get further along to higher levels), the list is so huge that even with that low ‘hit ratio’, my family room floor still looks like this:

Gareth reads me 2 or 3 books each day, sometimes more. We always read snuggled together on the couch, making it one of my favourite times each day. Hope this gave you some new ideas for creating a low-cost learning-to-read program for your own kids. Happy reading!

AAS is a very easy-to-use program, though it does require you to ‘teach’ it to your kids. (It’s not something they can do independently). But it is very teacher-friendly, each lesson broken up into small parts, and laid out clearly. I find it easy to either go with how the lessons are laid out, or adapt and expand off them—there is a structure to the program, but it is flexible. Kinda like a certain HSing family I know.

There are several parts to the AAS program. The core of it is in the teachers manual, which, for level 1, breaks the material into 24 lessons. I’ll show you our learning one of the last lessons in the book, on plural words, in more detail below. There are also different cards to use: Phoneme cards, which can be more complex than you might think, even for simple letters rather than consonant teams (sh, th, etc.) or other combos (oa, ar, ight and others that come in later lessons):

Sound cards, which are phoneme cards in reverse (you tell your child the sound or phoneme; they tell you which letter makes those sounds). Key cards, which illustrate rules of key concepts, like the “Floss Rule” below:

And word cards, which form the spelling lists that go with each lesson. I used them for reading practice for Gareth at the beginning of each lesson, about 10 per day, shuffling the cards and placing them face-down: Gareth flips and reads. I file in ‘mastered’ or ‘needs review’ (file tabs come with the program). And you can imagine a struggling reader’s confidence growing along with the pile of mastered words (note the huge stack in the background):

I also have the magnetic letter tiles (which come with the program) and a lined whiteboard, which I bought elsewhere. Now, let’s move on to look at the Plural Words lesson in some detail. I begin by consulting the teachers manual, and getting all the materials I need; a list is laid out for you. As I said, very teacher-friendly. Each lesson has three parts: the lesson itself (including review if you want; I simply use the word cards to give Gareth reading practice); a list of 10 spelling words, and a ‘more words and phrases’ part which again I use for reading practice rather than spelling.

I have the boys come up and participate in the lesson. My kids really like the tiles:

So now we have the first piece of information about plural words: the S at the end can make one of two sounds in English, ‘s’ or ‘z’. In fact, the ‘z’ sound at the end of an English word is far more likely to be spelled with an S than a Z! (AAS is full of little tips and rules like this, about things you intuitively know as an English-speaking adult, but are often hard to formulate in rule form for your kids learning to spell. “Just memorize it” doesn’t work for all kids).

We then looked at the other way words can be pluralized in English, with an ‘es’. We can tell when to use ‘es’ because we gain a syllable (AAS uses the concept of syllables a lot—open syllables, closed syllables, and 4 other types, and ties them to spelling rules. Ever wonder why ‘even’ and ‘seven’ don’t rhyme? Well, we’d divide the words into syllables as follows: e-ven, sev-en. The first syllable in ‘even’ is open, which means the vowel E is long. The first syllable in ‘seven’ is closed, so the vowel sound is short.):

I then summed up the lesson with a chart:

And you may have noticed Gareth’s extension of the lesson to a word he is quite keen on these days. The boys let me know the plural of pokemons followed the ‘add S, make ‘z’  sounds method, and we debated how to break the word into syllables, and what sort of syllables they were). The ‘lesson’ part here took maybe 10-15 minutes. AAS is very good at breaking material up into very small, very manageable parts.

Then it was on to the ten spelling words. I have the boys write these on paper in a notebook (so they can look back over time and see how their writing has improved), and Daegan uses the opportunity to practice cursive writing, as the words are quite easy for him. Side benefit: Gareth can now read cursive! Here’s their writing, Gareth first:

One thing that impresses me about AAS is how there are links back to earlier lessons. Within this spelling list, for example, we have connections to previous lessons where we learned when we use K and when we use CK for the ‘k’ sound. Do you know the rule?

We use CK immediately after a short vowel, and K otherwise. Hence ‘trucks’, but not ‘desks’—though the E is short, the ‘k’ sound does not follow it immediately.

We also had a link to the “Floss Rule" of a previous lesson. Why do we double the S in dress? Because in English we often double final Fs, Ls, and Ss in single-syllable words (hence, FLoSs rule).

And finally, some practice with the ‘sh’ phoneme we’d recently learned (all this was review and easy for Daegan—though he was surprised to learn that CH can also say ‘sh’, like in ‘chef’; but for Gareth learning these small bits, step by step, has been key to him ‘breaking the code’ and now reading fluently):

It takes us maybe 10 minutes to do the spelling words, and we like to make up silly sentences to go along with them, and make each other giggle. Honestly, I had no idea spelling could be such fun!

After the spelling words, Daegan does some independent work (right now he’s using Growing With Grammar, which I’ll write about another time), and Gareth comes with me to do some reading practice. Snuggled on the couch, we always start with the “more words and phrases” section at the end of each AAS lesson, and move on to a couple books. (I’ll write more about the rest Gareth’s ‘learning to read’ program another time too). I found the “more words and phrases” section of AAS a perfect fit for building reading skill and fluency; earlier lessons were simple words, and by the end of Level 1 he was reading full sentences. (There are also new readers matched to each lesson in the All About Reading program you can buy from the same folks):

I hope this gives you a good idea of what the AAS program is about, and why I like it so much. And while Level 1 is very basic, it has several more Levels, building slowly but comprehensibly and to a surprising complexity. We’re about half-way through Level 2 now. But the very best thing about this program, to me, is how my youngest son feels about it—and himself. Here he is the day he completed Level 1; a picture really is worth a thousand words, no?

That’s Gareth in the hospital bed distracting himself by watching TV, while big brother amuses himself with various games on the iPad.

Gareth’s asthma was bad enough we finally took him in to the Children’s Hospital, something in retrospect we should have done before now. Apparently 6-year-olds can be in full-blown asthma attack mode (enough that we jumped the queue and were admitted immediately at Emergency) yet still be running and jumping and, well….being 6. His oxygen levels were down—though thankfully not anywhere near dangerous / critical levels—and they got several medicines into him to stabilize him. And another very good thing to come of this is a referral to the Asthma Clinic, where Gareth will undertake a breathing test, and we all will have in-depth “asthma education” on better managing his condition. They called this morning and our appointment is booked just under a month from now.

We were at hospital until quite late, getting released to go home just after midnight. (You might be able to tell from the clock in the pic above that it was about 5 after 11:00). Jim’s been juggling a lot of things at work, and I’ve been leading up our home reno work that needs doing before winter sets in again (roof, furnaces, humidifiers, a/c and filters (which will all help G’s asthma), windows, the Poly-B plumbing pipe replacement…my meetings with contractors seem unending). So we parents looked like this:

Daegan was an awesome help, snuggling in with Gareth when there proved to be nothing worth watching on TV. The boys played some iPad games together to pass the time:

Feeling grateful for the Canadian health care system today. Yes, there are problems, as there are elsewhere, and they need to be addressed. But I have nothing but good things to say about the way we were treated, and the speed with which Gareth got the help he needed. There was a respiratory nurse (male! and our doctor was female! sooooo good for my boys to see this in real life) in our room admitting medicines and talking with us literally within 3 minutes of us walking in the Emergency room door. Thank you, universe.

Daegan then repeated the experiment, with the same result, and then Gareth asked me to do the same. “Do I really need to?” I asked. “Do you think the result might be different just because an adult is doing it?” “Maybe,” replied my 6-year-old, and after considering things from his 6-year-old perspective I thought it a reasonable request. After all, adults and kids DO often get different results when they take on tasks in the real world, from cutting safely with a knife to getting the right button in the right button hole. But I tried tearing the folded up paper first before putting it in water (and couldn’t!), explaining to Gareth that to do a science experiment, we need to have what’s called a “control” or point of comparison.

When I was done tearing my wet folded paper, Gareth handed out new sheets of paper and asked us to dip them directly in the water, no folding. I asked if he was wondering if it would work without folding too—did he think the folding made any difference to water making paper weaker? He said he wasn’t sure, hence the experiment. And again, his hypothesis was “confirmed”—water makes paper weaker, whether folded or not.

While this wasn’t the most complicated of experiments, I thought it interesting that Gareth came up with it himself, and that the variables he wanted to test (wet / dry, folded / unfolded, kid / adult) included some that I would not have thought of from my adult perspective.  And I learned it is not just Daegan who has been watching the PVR’ed Mythbusters!

The play began with Professor Frankelnick (played by Daegan) and his assistant (played by teacher / director Jacqueline) doing some bird watching, and spotting a nest of whooping crane eggs:

The eggs hatch, and the mother bird is there to give them food:

Soon the cranes get in formation and fly south to Texas where they spend the winter:

While they suntan on the beach, a Texan arrives, and soon Daegan arrives as well to band the birds:

The birds get spooked by a cat prowling in the bushes, and take off for a new area—a large garden. The landowners discover a slug in the backyard, and spray it with pesticide:

Soon the whooping cranes arrive, and see the slug (played by Gareth’s friend). The birds start munching on the slug, and Gareth says: “Does this slug taste funny?”

There ensues a hilarious scene in which the father whooping crane yells out “I’m too young to die!” while collapsing to the floor, and the birds and landowners rush around calling “Medic! Medic!” Fortunately, after using a defibrillator, Daddy crane is fine.

The play then ends with a song and dance number outlining some of the dangers whooping cranes face, and things we can do to help them:

Like, for example:

The cast then took their bows and gave their teacher / director a much deserved round of applause:

Afterwards, kids posed for pictures, tried on various costumes, ran around, and said goodbye to their friends. Here’s Daegan as the evil pesticide:

Evergreen will be running homeschool drama classes again next fall and winter. I can’t say enough good things about these classes: they have been my boys’ very favourite activity this year (and as you know, we do a lot of classes and workshops!), and I think the fun and joy these kids had putting on this play clearly comes through in the pictures. You can read details about next years’ classes below. At $99 / class, these are also one of the most affordable drama options available in Calgary. Hope to see some of you in class next fall!

Level One begins with the alphabet and basic sounds, the difference between vowels and consonants, short vowel sounds and a few sight words. Gareth was able to do this level with little difficulty, though reading some of the longer sentences proved challenging—e.g., “Nan and Meg sat on the red rug.” He can sound out all these words, and knows the sight word “the”, but he needs practice getting his speed up and reading sentences rather than individual words. I like how the DVD divides up the content into short segments, and builds slowly, from sounds to words, to word families, to saying the word after the narrator, to saying it before the narrator, to reading entire sentences. The picture and video clues also vary, in the beginning being presented alongside the letter or word to cue the reader, and later being presented afterwards (i.e., after the reader has read it to themselves). I especially liked how they did this with sentences. There was one something like “Jan had a red wig and Nan had a red cap”, and only after Gareth figured out the sentence on his own (I paused the show to allow him enough time), and then the narrator said it aloud did a picture of two women, one with a red wig, one with a red cap, appear.  

Level Two features the elements of reading Gareth is working on right now. It begins with a review of the materials from Level One, and then goes on to talk about long vowels sounds and silent ‘e’, the difference between open and closed syllables and vowel sounds in English—e.g, the O in ‘not’ is short because it is “closed in” by the T, whereas in ‘no’ it is open and hence a long vowel sound (ditto for ‘go’ and ‘got’, ‘be’ and ‘beg’, etc.)—consonant blends, both beginning (bl, dr, str, etc.) and ending (nd, mp, ng, etc.), and r-controlled vowels (ar, er, ir, or, ur), as well as additional sight words. As in the first video, the skills build slowly, and sight words are presented in manageable groups of 6-8 words at a time. By the end of the video, kids can read sentences like “One time Jill rode her horse far from home and got lost.” If your child already knows their basic letter sounds, I’d say just get Level Two and skip Level One.

There are also U-print activity booklets on the discs, but we haven’t investigated them at all. Just watching the video in short segments together, me pausing the show and Gareth reading aloud to me has been plenty of practice. And just like with the Bob books, which we are also working through right now, Gareth almost always wants to do “just one more lesson / book” before we stop for the day, which is my sign that this program is working for him. YMMV. Please share any other beginning reader materials your kids have enjoyed in the comments. Thanks!

We’ve now read three level 1 books:

Pat, Cat and Rat and Matt and Sid are fiction; Big Cats non-fiction. All three were very comfortable for Gareth to read aloud. He’s also read my three level 2 books, which seem to be just the right level for him at present:

And two from level 3, which has proven a stretch for Gareth, but one he is managing with just a bit of help from Mom or Dad:

A few things I particularly like about these books. They start simple—very simple, much like the Bob books, just a few words per page making up a simple sentence: “I am Pat” or “I am mad at Dan!” The text is quite large and easy on the eyes of a beginning reader (why oh why do SO MANY beginning reader books have small type???), and the pictures colourful and engaging. The books keep to fairly simple words, but not in a stifling “See Dick. See Jane. See Dick and Jane” kind of way, as each book features some common ‘sight words’, like “there” “is” or “when”. I particularly like that a list of these sight words—again in large text—is included at the beginning of each title, allowing you to go over them with your child. And unlike other series which list EVERY word in the given book—my 6-year-old PANICS when he sees these lists, 3 or 4 columns long with 15-20 words per column—these titles focus on a very limited (8 – 10 or so) number of key or sight words, like so:

The beginning and end pages of the book contain suggestions for games and activities to support your developing reader, like playing sight word memory / concentration, or playing rhyming games, or incorporating movement into sounding out words for kinesthetic learners. And I love that they stress, right at the beginning, the importance of keeping reading an enjoyable activity, stating explicitly that if your child is becoming frustrated or bored, take a break! As a former elementary school teacher, I can tell you that I saw many parents win the battle, but lose the war when it came to reading. Yup, the kid CAN read, but he WON’T, unless forced to. Sigh.

Anyhow, if you are looking for a series of books to start with for very beginning (emergent) readers other than the ever-popular Bob books, give this series a try.  Watching Gareth’s confidence grow as he reads one book per night—even seeking out other members of the family to read to now—has been heart-warming.